Leadership and meekness

(Published in English by Inter-American Institute for Democracy on Tuesday May 28, 2023)

Where the law ends, tyranny begins

-John Locke

According to the Old Testament, Moses, the prophet, led his Hebrew people, fleeing political and religious persecution, on a pilgrimage that wandered through the desert for 40 years. In that collective odyssey – says the Bible – Moses ascended Mount Sinai and received from God the tablets with the Ten Commandments of the Judaic faith, which gave rise to Christianity.

Another interpretation of that wandering pilgrimage through the desert is that it had the purpose that, during those four decades, the adults would die and with them their slave mentality, and their offspring would be born as mindless beings to return to Judea and be able to to free his people.

Mainly since the beginning of the 20th century, Latin Americans have been subjected to cultural colonialism, a mixture of nationalism, fascism and socialism, which had its most disastrous expression in European national-socialism, and which paradoxically still survives today throughout the world.

The triumph of the Allies in World War II resulted in the prevalence of democracy as the dominant political system.

However, nationalist-socialist fascism, sown for a long time in our institutions and customs, did not finish dying and even returned in a Christian-socialist-revolutionary cultural graft, wrapped in democracy.

The 21st century has seen that cultural graft sprout in what today infects almost all of America, including the United States, which cannot fully digest the fascism personified by Donald Trump and his call for the "New American Grandiosity" reminiscent of the "Greatness German” of Hitler; and the Russian today, longed for by Putin.

The Creole version that has colonized us over time, through various nationalist and revolutionary socialist manifestations, has culminated in the Movimiento Al Socialismo, MAS, regime, subjecting us to the political punching of Cuba, which is managing to tame us and mentally enslave us to accept as inevitable the facho-socialist yoke of the MAS, and its indefinite permanence in power.

The State crime and collective murder perpetuated at the Hotel Las Américas, the kidnapping of the governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, and the gross fraud long condoned by the AFSI in the management of the bank FASSIL from Santa Cruz are some of the actions of the government, mainly to punish Santa Cruz and tame the political opposition.

If we achieve that of subduing the critical spirit and rebellion of the Bolivian people in the face of the outrage, abuse and corruption of the MAS regime, we will have lost the battle for the return to democracy, freedom and justice, even before starting it.

A worrying symptom of this obvious political and cultural taming is that the MAS has managed to capture the entire political spectrum, both the government and the opposition, through: Arce-government and Evo-opposition. That is to say, today, the MAS has no alternative political contender in our collective mentality.

This "takeover" of the public sphere has extended to also monopolize our information spaces.

Reviewing the content of news and comments in the media, including those considered independent or critical of the regime, we see the almost absolute omnipresence of news and comments on the life and miracles of the MAS-government and MAS-opposition, and that of its two characters: Lucho and Evo. The yin and the yang.

Could it be that, as in the time of Moses, Bolivians also need to undertake a pilgrimage through the desert of exile, for 40 years, to free ourselves from this mentality of political slavery to which they are subjecting us?

Ronald MacLean was mayor of La Paz

four times and held five state posts.